Friday, September 10, 2010

Dazzle: Old School is New School

You know I always find it interesting when a new concept breaths new life into one that has been around for awhile. I am delivering the VDI message as the interest level is extremely high and it is a good solution in many cases. As a person who has been in the industry for a while, I was delivering Presentation virtualization when it was just called server based computing. Over the last few months I have had a few customers mention that they consider terminal services (TS) a legacy delivery method. The great criticism has always been that it changes the user experience by not delivering a full desktop (I do recognize you can deliver a shared server desktop but in general it is not recommended).

What is interesting is that on an iPad this is it's greatest strength. There is a lot of development being done by all VDI vendors to provide a iPad client to deliver the desktop anywhere. Some of them have delivered and a few are in alpha or beta. But from using sysadmin type tools on the iPad, I am wondering if going straight to the app provides a better experience then first to the desktop and then to the app?

As a TS administrator can tell you, giving up the desktop in favor of thin clients in a traditional Citrix or TS Server environment was a bit of an up hill battle. But does the iPad close this last mile of hard fought over end user space? Clearly Citrix has hedged their bets by providing an Apple'esc method of consuming applications called Dazzle. VMware mentioned a similar on demand application model but details were light and Microsoft has significantly improved TS server in the release of 2008. What may not serve the vendors as well is the rebranding around desktop centric virtualization. As we look to transition from IT shops to Service driven organizations the server based computing/tablet model has become compelling thanks in large part to the iPad. And unlike in past IT end user turf wars the demand for the new device is coming from the users themselves.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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